Donald Trump Jr.’s Tweet About ‘Racist Air’ Epically Backfires

Donald Trump Jr. mocked a news story, which highlighted how air pollution is disproportionately affecting Black and Hispanic communities.

Last year, scientists from the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) published a study documenting that Blacks and Hispanics were more likely to be exposed to air pollution, even though whites were more likely to cause it. The study detailed that long-term exposure to pollutants were associated with racial segregation, with more highly segregated areas suffering higher levels of exposure.

In fact, figures from the study determined that Blacks are exposed to 56 percent more pollution than what they actually produce, while Hispanics are 63 percent more likely to be affected by the air they breathe.

The study, which focused on particulate matter, concluded that this type of pollution was instrumental in several lung conditions, heart attacks, and possible premature deaths. The pollutant has even been implicated in both asthma prevalence and severitylow birth weights, and high blood pressure among Blacks and Hispanics in urban areas.

Those findings were obviously lost on Donald Trump Jr. who in an effort to minimize the importance of the study, and its findings, posted a ridiculously asinine tweet about “racist air” in response to a tweet from USA Today. It appeared that President Trump’s namesake believed that a scientific study of pollution had a prejudice against Blacks and Hispanic people.

Folks on Twitter showed no mercy in terms of rebutting Trump Jr.’s tweet.

Ouch! It was brutal.

Even Greenpeace USA Climate Campaign Director Janet Redman weighed in on the tweet saying: “Environmental racism is no joke. People like Donald Trump Jr. think structural inequality and environmental racism aren’t real because they are as invisible to them as the air they breathe. But we need only to look at Flint, Michigan, to understand that while pollution affects us all, it does not affect us all equally. In fact, black and brown communities disproportionately bear the burden of the Trump administration’s rollback of policies to protect our air, water, and climate. This is why we must fight for racial and environmental justice hand in hand.”

Wealth and privilege does make many people oblivious to environmental dangers that people from a lower socio-economic level endure. People with access to better living environments, via access to money, manage to avoid the harmful causes of pollution because they are able to afford ‘pollution-intensive goods and services.’

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